Many large businesses must deliver communications and technology services to a large and globally distributed development community. Many of these enterprises are unable to provide adequate scalability and leverage of certain of their service groups, such as their information technology/information services (IT/IS) groups, whereby the resources of those groups can be deployed to their fullest potential and to the optimum benefit of the enterprise.
In the past, service groups like IT/IS have been engaged to help, recommend and support the architectural guidelines within an enterprise, continuously monitoring the latest available technologies in the market, responding to inquiries from the enterprise's developer community, and providing resources in various forms. Acting as ambassadors between projects addressing analogous problems ranging from code guidelines to specific implementation questions, these groups are part of an essential central services network. At the same time, increases in an enterprise's physical growth, technology requirements and development costs have further highlighted the need to optimize this kind of approach. By enhancing communication and collaboration, promoting technology standards and best practices, and better leveraging communication throughout the enterprise, a large business entity can realize significant cost reduction and productivity gain.
An advantage exists, therefore, for Web-based system and method involving a Web portal that can be used by groups and individuals of a business enterprise to promote collaboration, knowledge sharing, best practices and information reuse across an enterprise's IT/IS and developer community.